The Song of the Lord, The Bhagavad-Gita

In
sanskrit Bhagavad-Gita means "song of the Lord". The
Bagavad-Gita is a a sanskrit poem incorporated into the
Mahabharata, one of the greatest religious
classics of Hinduism. The Gita (as it is often called)
consists of a dialogue between
Lord
Krishna and Prince Arjuna on the eve of the
great battle of Kurukshetra.

Arjuna is
overcome with anguish when he sees in the opposing army
many of his kinsmen, teachers, and friends. Krishna
persuades him to fight by instructing him in spiritual
wisdom and the means of attaining union with God. The
main doctrines of the Gita are karma-yoga, the yoga of
selfless action performed with inner detachment from its
results; jnana-yoga, the yoga of knowledge and
discrimination between the lower nature of man and his
soul, which is identical with the supreme self; and
bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion to a particular god-in
this case, Krishna, who reveals himself to Arjuna as the
avatara (incarnation) of
Vishnu, Lord of the Universe. The
Bhagavad-Gita is essentially Upanishadic in content,
but it differs significantly from the brahman-atman
doctrine of the
Upanishads in teaching that the highest God
is personal and that love and surrender to God's grace
is a better and easier spiritual path than that of pure
knowledge. The Gita has been the subject of many
commentaries and has been much translated. Its
translators include Annie Besant, Sir Edwin Arnold,
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Mohandas Gandhi.